Secret furniture gets brilliant, elaborate physical mechanism [Video]

It’s hard to find a single screengrab to illustrate this great video of craftsman Brian Grabski‘s work-in-progress furniture: that’s because it hides a fiendishly clever mechanism by which you can open a secret drawer. The hand-crafted chest-of-drawers demands you pull open each of the visible drawers, before a hidden control springs out and allows you to trigger the secret compartment built into what looks like a normal molding.

Video demo after the cut

To make things more complex, each of the drawers must be pulled out to a certain point before the latches they control slide out of the way, similar to how the pins in a regular lock work. That finally allows a length of wooden dowel to slide out – hidden, normally, as a knot in the wood itself – and when you twist it and then push it back in, a cable tracked around the back of the cabinet allows the hidden drawer to spring out.

So far there’s no sign of the finished product on Grabski’s site, but from looking through the rest of his gallery we’ve no reason to believe it isn’t going to end up looking brilliant. Sadly we don’t think we can afford to commission him ourselves.